The Tudors: The Complete Story of England's Most Notorious Dynasty

by G.J. Meyer

Book Overview

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - For the first time in decades comes a fresh look at the fabled Tudor dynasty, comprising some of the most enigmatic figures ever to rule a country. "A thoroughly readable... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 038534077X
• ISBN13: 9780385340779
• Release Date: March 2011
• Publisher: Bantam
• Length: 672 Pages
• Weight: 1.22 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 5.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Excellent well- written history

I truly enjoyed this book. Well- researched and presented. The short background chapters that provide an overview of the core topic in each section are very full of insight. I especially like the lack of sensationalism about henry viii in this book. It is fascinating to read, yet has an almost somber tone to it.

I must be the target audience.

I loved this book, but I think I may be dead center in the target audience: educated, interested in history but not a historian, and reading this book for leisure, not enlightenment. It reminds me very much of Thomas Carlyle's "History of the French Revolution." Meyer gets away from the dry facts and detailed historical analysis and tells us the history as a detailed story. That's exactly what I was looking for and Meyer does a great job. While much was left out in order to get down to a single volume, I certainly didn't miss any of it. After all, I was learning new info with nearly every page and the story flowed quite well. This a perfect book for someone who wants an accurate historical novel without any fiction mixed in to confuse the history. I think it's a mistake to expect much more from a book the author clearly meant for a general audience. He sticks to the big themes and neceassarily leaves out stuff that really isn't important unless you are a serious student of history. For example, I don't care about the details of Henry VII's various victories while he consolidated power. The important plotline is that he got lucky, became king almost by accident, and turned out to be a great man. Twenty-five pages was enough to get a feel for the events of the day and set up the rest of the story. I can understand why some readers found the digression chapters a little off-putting. They broke up the story line and were, as you might expect, not always directly relevant to the story. I enjoyed them. They were like nice little breaks where Meyer got to inject more of his personal opinion about something in the general historical period. I read the book in sections and found the digressions amusing. If you wanted to read straight through the Tudor storyline, then they were easy enough to skip and come back to later, but I think they provided some color and were worthwhile. All in all, "The Tudors" was entertaining and educational for me as a layperson and I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys history as a story.

Riveting Read

Summarizing the summary: + Informative + Denounces common misconceptions + Reads like a novel Summary: This book is written in a novel fashion, where one chapter flows to the next like a story. However, I appreciate that there is no fiction to be found. Meyer even goes so far as to denounce some common misconceptions that are held by most people. His tone is very factual, with a dash of humor thrown in, which is riveting to read. This book makes history come alive. I like the attention paid to all the Tudors, and not just Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. He illustrates the importance of the founder, Henry VII, and all the other lesser characters in this dynasty. Meyers includes the start of the Tudor dynasty, which is helpful in understanding the politics and economics behind their success. Overall, even for those not interested in history, this is a great read, and worth every dollar.

Much much better than being there

For generations, the century of England's Tudors has presented a complicated picture. According to this picture, Henry VIII and his daughter Elizabeth I rid the nation of a corrupt church and founded an age of enlightenment. Of course, Henry had a few marital issues, but the picture was largely positive. In recent decades that portrait has begun to crumble. G.J. Meyer puts in the final dagger and kicks it over the edge. The age of the Tudors begins when the short but bloody reign of Richard III meets its end on the battlefield. Henry Tudor, a man with a questionable claim (as if any claim could be legitimate) becomes Henry VII. His time on the throne is dedicated to amassing gold, and he turns out to be pretty good at it. When the crown passes to his son, England is forced down a path of change that lasted for centuries. Henry VIII was obsessed with his own succession. When he became convinced that his wife could give him no male heirs, he began a battle with the Catholic church to have the marriage annulled. This escalated until he broke completely with the church, founding his own religion and asserted his claim of supreme rulership. He created legalisms which allowed him to pillage the churches, kill his enemies, and steal their lands. He extracted money from a population already teetering on the edge of abject poverty. He lavishly rewarded his friends and embarked on foolish military adventures. It would take the nation many generations to recover from the debt, and animosities born then have lingered to the present day. While most historical accounts elide the time between Henry and Elizabeth, there was significant turmoil in those dozen years. There was a period of regency as the boy king Edward gradually took the reigns of a bloody period of intolerance. Jane Grey became queen for a little over a week. Mary began with great hope and ended having initiated a terrible period of counter-persecution, as ruthless toward Protestants as her father and brother had been toward the Catholics. Finally we reach Elizabeth, with the tide turning against the Catholics once again. Meyer argues convincingly that the primary focus of her reign was self-preservation. This is convincing when one considers her lack of interest in the succession. Her enemies--real or perceived--perished on trumped-up and transparent charges. She continued the wholesale style of execution begun by her family: I will not describe it here but it is cruel beyond measure. One of the real strength of Meyer's book is context. Interleaved with the chapters on the primary characters are chapters giving us a sense of the world as it was. There are sections on English monasticism, the Council of Trent, English theater and public education. We learn about the Protestant upheavals begun by Luther, then Calvin, leading to the age of the Puritans. There were hundreds of wars and skirmishes waged by foolish rulers across Europe, for no reasons other than vanity and

It's important to have good "PR"...

...if you're a despot on the throne. G E Meyer's biography of the Tudor dynasty - all five rulers - shows why William Shakespeare got paid the big bucks to rewrite British history as he did with his plays about their immediate predecessors. The five Tudors - beginning with Henry VII and ending with Elizabeth - were an interesting group. Their slightly more than 100 year occupation of the British throne is examined closely by Meyer (no relation to me). He writes "popular" history - accessible to the average non-academic reader. And he does a good job at it, too. Following every chapter in this large book is a few-page section called "Background", where Meyer goes into detail on something he's covered in the previous chapter. He may write a small section about "John Calvin", for instance, when discussing the Reformation as developing on the Continent as opposed to how the Church of England evolved at the same time. I've never seen another historian do this in a book, and I heartily approve. One thing that he writes about in one of his "Background" sections is the English alphabet in the 16th century. Evidently, it had only 24 letters and one of them, the letter, "y", was actually pronounced as a "th" sound. SO, we have "ye olde tea shoppe" which should be pronounced "the" olde tea shop. Interesting fact, I think. If a writer of history is going to pursue a dynasty, he's best concentrating on one or two particular issues to link the generations. I'd say Meyer uses "religion" as his major theme here. And maybe the various personalities - spouses and advisers - who served each of the five Tudors, as his minor theme. The same families pop up time and again as they serve the Tudors in "supporting roles" during their reigns. And regarding Shakespeare, who wrote during the last years of Elizabeth's reign. Her 45 or so years on the throne were not the "golden era" we have come to believe. As Meyer points out, the poor and unfortunate members of society greatly increased during her reign. She was not a particularly successful ruler but she had very good "PR", both then and after. Meyer writes very readable history here. The book is long but never boring. The only disturbing thing is that the book's subtitle is "The Complete Story of England's Most Notorious Dynasty". By using the word "notorious" in the title, I think the publisher is cheapening the contents of the book.